organizing thoughts

T-minus 5 days or so and counting down - exams begin on Tuesday morning at 9. ACK.

Fortunately, my Lush order (www.lushusa.com) FINALLY arrived yesterday evening, and so I've spent the last 27 hours as smelling mostly like jasmine and vetivert (WOOT for Silky Underwear!!!!) - though right now a silver glitter-covered lavender field - and largely quite glittery (giving rise to what is referred to on the forums as, to be quite blunt, "disco pubes"). I just took a long bath with a Black Pearl bomb and I'm feeling significantly calmer than I was before hand.

I've hit the point of realizing that if I don't already know it, the chances of me figuring it out before exams start on Tuesday are slim to none, so I'm going to start reviewing tomorrow. I'm persisting in saving Sir Gawain and the Green Knight until roughly Sunday night, because I love that poem and I think it would be great to draw a bunch of correlations with. That said, tomorrow will start a slew of typing involving everything I can think of on the following topics:

- hagiography (specifically women)
- mysticism (specifically positive - I don't have much of anything on negative)
- drama:
- Corpus Christi "cycle" "mystery" plays
- morality plays
- Saint's Plays (really, just the Digby Mary Magdalene)
- dream visions
- Chaucer
- allegory
- chronicles
- romance
- labor
- representations of labor
- estates satire
- women's work
- the Church
- antifraternal literature
- theology
- questions of salvation
- sacraments
- heresy
- competing cultural worldviews (i.e., Christian v. Celtic)
- community
- definitions of
- creation of national identity
- humor
- sex
- marriage
- antifeminism
- love
- erotic love
- agape/divine love
- bizarre intersections between the two
-authority


About a week and a half ago, Kate asked for a list of questions of various ideas I'd come up with based on all the reading. Here's what I gave her - the Julian (divine love) question and the Wycliffite/Lollardy question are utter crap, but she liked everything else. I got told I should be writing exam questions. That's great and all, but I'm not sure I could give coherent answers to all of these. Hopefully most of the answers are located buried in some other blog posts and I just need to dig them out. Here goes:


- How are histories used for political purposes, and/or how are they used to shape the political landscape or peoples’ understanding of political power and the exercise of that power? Also, what other genres (such as romance or epic poetry) can be used or created to further the exercise of political prerogatives?

- What is the role of morality in romance? More specifically, perhaps, how does the sort of morality in romance compare to more traditional Christian morality, and how do romance texts deal with this tension?

- How does violence work to create gender roles – specifically, how does violence work to create a sense of masculinity? Can violence be co-opted by women? How is violence represented, and how is it dealt with and understood?

- How does marriage create/inform societal gender roles? When were women given power, and how were they often deprived of what power they had? How was marriage used to control female sexuality, and in what ways were women able to control their own sexuality?

- How do allegories teach people to understand language as a system of signs, or to teach people to read those systems – i.e., how do allegories function to ‘teach readers to read’? How do allegories provide insight into the state of the human soul and its varying depths? How does the way an allegorical text plays with puns, words and meanings force the reader to become more conscious of his/her own reading practices?

- How do dream visions open up sites for the authors to discuss and debate contentious, difficult, or abstract topics? Do dream visions open up a particularly vivid site for social and spiritual questioning and questing? How does the dream vision shield the author from criticism?

- How are Corpus Christi cycle plays effective in establishing and regulating guild and labor activities and modes of production? What is the relation of labor to the production of the plays, and what is the importance of the plays to the civil life of the cities in which they are performed?

- How does the performance of cycle plays help to establish a sense of community and communion? How do they establish the importance of sacraments, particularly of the Eucharist?

- Why did the Lollard heresy seem to be such a threat to the order of daily life in England, and why was it reacted to with such fervor? Why were the movement’s more populist overtones so particularly threatening, and how were they manifested?

- How was one’s estate determined, and what is the importance of each estate in the overall medieval conception of society? What is the role of estate satire in bringing to light real social conditions of the day? How did estate satire expose both the good and the bad in the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of each estate’s social roles?

- How is the medieval sense of self revealed? How does interiority play out in both courtly texts (Tristan comes to mind) and in religious texts – especially with regards to confession and contrition? In what ways is the subject seen to be self-determining, and in what ways is the subject formed in interaction with the pressures of society?

- How is English identity formed, and how is it understood? What social groups constitute the “Other” and what do those groups have to say about the state of England and “Englishness”?

- In what ways do the texts understand the increasing role of the market economy and of the role of work in daily life? How does one’s labor help to define one by estate, or does the increasing role of commodity production and consumption challenge the traditional conception of the ‘estate’ – i.e., how does the literature account for the increase of what we would anachronistically refer to as the “middle class,” and what sort of attitude often prevails towards members of that class?

- What is the social relevance of affective piety? Why do outward shows of contrition have such importance, and what sort of social work does this do? How do they help point to a conception of sin as being a social problem, rather than merely an individual spiritual problem?

- What conceptions are there of divine love, and how do these conceptions overlap? Divine love could be interpreted to mean variously the role of the love of God for his creation, the love felt by Christians toward God, or the role of love of humans for each other in salvation.


So basically what it boils down to is that I need to know all of that for exams on Tuesday. The minor field list has a whole other set of issues, except for allegory, which I can handle well in either category. The above is also why I haven't posted in a while. I've been relatively consumed with self-doubt lately in the moments I'm not feeling either complacent or like it's been nice out (until yesterday) and wanting to be outside "communing with nature" as it were (read to mean: getting sunburned while sitting on my shady porch for a few hours on Saturday afternoon reading Chaucer crit, talking to Mom, Dad and Alan and wearing SPF 45). In 8 days this will all be over and after a lot of sleep I'll probably end up typing out a poorly spelled drunk post. And then revising a paper for the Kalamazoo conference and driving 10+ hours to Kazoo for drinking and playing and geeking out with 3500 other sincerely warped megageeks.

Now if only the carpal tunnel would go away -- I'm threatening to bring BenGay to the exam so my wrists will stop throbbing...